The case for colonialism

The West might be superficially divided between hawks and doves, but there is a deeper division: between foxes and hedgehogs. In a famous essay on Tolstoy, Isaiah Berlin said the division was ‘one of the deepest’ among human beings. The distinction applies just as well to politicians and governments.

Foxes, said Berlin, are sophisticated, pluralist, usually atheist, and distrustful of absolutes. Hedgehogs are anti-intellectual, single-minded, often religious, and comfortable with certainties, chief among which are ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Foxes think many small things; hedgehogs think one big thing.

The UN and the EU are fox heaven. They stand for multilateralism and the ‘post-modern’ world order, for negotiation, containment and compromise. The mood is pacific and highbrow; the instruments are protocols, charters and communiquZs. Nato, on the other hand, is hedgehog country. Its one big thing is its belief in the essential rightness of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the Anglo-Saxon political model. The mood is belligerent; the instruments are made of metal and come in grey, green and black.

The foxes of the world include the present governments of Germany, France and once plucky little Belgium, as well as a handful of malcontents including China and Russia (former hedgehogs whose one big thing was proved wrong). The hedgehogs today include the US, Britain, Australia, Canada, Italy, Spain, India, Mexico, Israel and Japan. And it is worth emphasising the central point of Robert Kagan’s new book Of Paradise and Power: that the foxish ideology developed in the UN and the EU can only exist because the hedgehog exists, in the form of the US security guarantee. As Kagan puts it, by ‘manning the walls of Europe’s post-modern world order …American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important’. American power, not European multilateralism, has kept the peace, and allowed the EU and the UN to survive and prosper to the point where they now pose a challenge of moral leadership to the US itself.